Why Derrick Bell matters [Reader Post]

from Flopping Aces by DrJohn

 

Because Derrick Bell lives on in Barack Obama. Bell was Obama’s ideological mentor. Compare the following excerpts:

Bell believe that the US Constitution was a form of original sin.
Bell:

At the nation’s beginning, the framers saw more clearly than is perhaps possible in our more enlightened and infinitely more complex time the essential need to accept what has become the American contradiction. The framers made a conscious, though unspoken, sacrifice of the rights of some in the belief that this forfeiture was necessary to secure the rights of others in a society embracing, as its fundamental principle, the equality of all. And thus the framers, while speaking through the Constitution in an unequivocal voice, at once promised freedom for whites and condemned blacks to slavery….

…The Constitution has survived for two centuries and, despite earnest efforts by committed people, the contradiction remains, shielded and nurtured through the years by myth. This contradiction is the root reason for the inability of black people to gain legitimacy — that is, why they are unable to be taken seriously when they are serious and why they retain a subordinate status as a group that even impressive proofs of individual competence cannot overcome. Contradiction, shrouded by myth, remains a significant factor in blacks’ failure to obtain meaningful relief against historic racial injustice.

…The reason that the Civil War amendments failed to produce equality for blacks remains an all-too-familiar barrier today: effective remedies for harm attributable to discrimination in society in general will not be granted to blacks if that relief involves a significant cost to whites. Even in northern states, abolitionists’ efforts following the Revolutionary War were stymied by this unspoken principle. Today, affirmative action remedies as well as mandatory school desegregation plans founder as whites balk at bearing the cost of racial equality.

Barack Obama believes the Constitution is “deeply flawed.”
Obama in 2001:

“The original Constitution as well as the Civil War Amendments,” he replied. “But I think it is an imperfect document, and I think it is a document that reflects some deep flaws in American culture, the Colonial culture nascent at that time.

“African-Americans were not — first of all they weren’t African-Americans — the Africans at the time were not considered as part of the polity that was of concern to the Framers. I think that as Richard said it was a ‘nagging problem’ in the same way that these days we might think of environmental issues, or some other problem where you have to balance cost-benefits, as opposed to seeing it as a moral problem involving persons of moral worth.

“And in that sense,” Obama continued, “I think we can say that the Constitution reflected an enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on until this day, and that the Framers had that same blind spot. I don’t think the two views are contradictory, to say that it was a remarkable political document that paved the way for where we are now, and to say that it also reflected the fundamental flaw of this country that continues to this day.”

Can there be any doubt from [...]